Martin Luther

Yes, the monk in the 1500s...not the King Jr., and both equally respectable. But I have been doing a lot of reading lately...comes with the whole grad. school thing...and I came across a Forawrd he wrote to Georg Rhau's Symphoniae, a collection of chorale motets published in 1538. Avid music lover, you might like this as I paraphrase a bit:

 I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! ... The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them...In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits...A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.

 I was eaing lunch in one of the dining places at ECU while I read this, and I burst out laughing. It was one of those moments where folks look at you and wonder...surely those moments are quite common for me. Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed sharing!

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Concert FRIDAY

...no this is not another attempt at creating a catchy title in order to help me blog. We have a concert Friday night at St. Paul's Episcopal Church - high ceilings, where the acoustic rolls around forever, stone floors, 52-rank organ that is breathtakingly beautiful, and a beautiful chancel. Great place to sing and be heard...and with that kind of acoustic, you can in some ways be your own audience...
Chamber Singers will sing Calvisius, Brahms, Schumann, Boyce, Paulus, Rutter, Poch, and Alwes. And Choral Scholars (the graduate lab choir for the conducting students) will do a plethora of pieces. I am conducting William Byrd's Ave verum corpus, and hopefully all will work out musically on my part - I'm not at all worried about the choir (and I never really thought I'd say that). Hopefully I can calm myself internally to trust my hands to do everything right and my ears to hear what every beautiful note they sing.
It's going to be a great experience!

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Tuneful Tuesday

Matt actually gets the credit for this - Frank LaRocca's "O Magnum Mysterium"

Handel's Messiah, but only Part the First. I've listened to a few portions of Part the Second.

Poulenc's Gloria...again. I truly recommend getting this. See if your local library has it, and if it doesn't it is completely worth the bucks you'll use on it in iTunes. If at all possible, listen to it with the score (Dr. Simmons might be able to help you out; if you're really ambitious, J.W. Pepper.com can certainly help you.)

I brought back a little bit of the band Vigilantes of Love this morning, a band I started listening to in high school and had a crush on.

We continue our studies of Brahms in Chamber Singers, and more and more I see just how masterful, and surprisingly NOT dark, fatalistic, or sullen as might be the label he gets often.

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Workshopping middle and high school choral kids...

I taught...well, really congealed/ solidified, middle school basses a Patrick Liebergen version of a Handel piece from Joshua (which is really a Liebergen score influenced by Handel), and Morten Lauridsen's Sure On This Shining Night. The kids did really well, especially the high school guys. It was good to get back into teaching high school choral kids again, and I'm excited about conducting the Greenville Choral Society Youth Chorale! Great kids!

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Rehearsal.

Today in Chamber Singers, the group that's doing Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light and Brahms' Schaffe in mir Gott, we rehearsed the Brahms and the Boyce Ave Maria, which I completely undercut and diminished in a post a couple of weeks ago b/c it's fantabulastic. Rehearsal didn't go so well as far as revisited notes. Under pitched and in certain circumstances completely wrong: not-even-in-the-same-zip-code-as-the-correct-pitch wrong. I could sense that Dr. Bara was not well pleased, and he did a marvelous job of not adding his unhappiness to the equation of a bad rehearsal. And he sends an email to each performer to express his disapproval. The first sentence: "Dear colleagues, We are better than today’s rehearsal suggests...." Dagger to the heart. We understand he's disappointed, but this sentence in the context of the entire email tells us that we should be too. "New music [Ave Maria - we've rehearsed it two days] must be approached with zeal, energy, curiosity, and absolute fearlessness. Who’s going be the one to nail it first? To make the first mistake and fix it? Older music must be approached with mindfulness of all that has been learned before, musical sensitivity, a vigilant ear for intonation and tone, and a renewed commitment to make it better piece than when we left it." Aside from all that I learned about being a conductor in this email, this letter enlightened not only an approach to music but an appraoch to life. Translation/ correlation/metaphor for life: We're two weeks into the new school year, the giddiness of newness has subsided...or should have. When do we decide to move from there? Do we decide to move from there? If we don't decide to move on, there is a major problem. When we approach a piece of music, Scripture, marriage, or anything that we love that is of substance to us, anything that captures our emotional attention, when do we decide to move from the "giddiness," the on-the-surface of it into the exertion or excercise or application or utilization of it? Two weeks? Two years? Two days? Two hours? I think when we can answer something like the latter, we've found something profound.

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Tuneful Tuesday

ON TUESDAY! (almost...but you're probably reading on Tuesday!)

Arvo Pärt - Missa Syllabica; Cantate Dominum Canticum Novum

Beethoven - Missa Solemnis

Norman Dello Joio - A Jubilant Song
Dan Davison - Shout for Joy
Stephen Paulus - Pilgrim's Hymn

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Tuneful Tuesday

Have you had your daily dose of Poulenc's Gloria? What about Stravinsky's Symphony of Palms? Well, what are you waiting for??

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Tuneful Tuesday...

Ok, I know it isn't Tuesday, but it's a "tradition" I started on this blog, and with my blogging habits...well, the two don't exactly mix well, and you're lucky to even be getting this post.

As, I've mentioned once or twice, graduate school is truly amazing; even after it gets busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest. In Chamber Singers, we are doing a concert in October, which should be streamed on the ECU School of Music web page, and for that concert we are performing none other than Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light! I was ecstatic! If I get asked to conduct part of a Chamber Singers rehearsal, guess what I'm rehearsing... We're doing a Brahm's Motet (Schaffe in mir Gott), a Schumann Motet (Und ob ich schon wanderte) [after next semester or next fall I might be able to translate that for you], and a few other octavos - an Ave Maria and a couple of spirituals.

I am conducting William Byrd's Ave verum corpus in Choral Scholars, and it's many much fun. Along those lines of music listening, we have been talking about the early 1500s in choral literature class, so I am becoming more familiar with Palestrina. Whoa! Beautiful composer! I mean, I knew I liked his music before the class, but I'm becoming more aware of why I like it. Points of immitation, texture changes because of the music's text....blah, blah, blah.

In University Chorale we are doing a gorgeous Clausen piece, O My Luve's Like A Red, Red Rose and Sing Unto God by Paul Fetler. Great pieces!

In November, Chamber Singers will be performing Mozart's Requiem at least three times - once on campus, another time at a local church, and for the North Carolina Music Educator's Association. Oh! it's four times. once for some high school kids that come for choral festival...I hope they last 50 minutes and don't clap between movements...

That's about it for now. I have a feeling Tuneful Tuesday will become more random and ultimately will not link itself to Tuesday at all... Stay Tunedful Tuesday...er, something.

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...

So I'm not a good blogger...at least I know it's not my calling in life.
However! Getting higher degrees IS, I believe, my calling. I didn't think school could possibly be any better than under graduate studies. Oh, no, mein freund! I absolutely LOVE graduate work. (At least for now.) You get paid to do what you're longing heart desires to do in academia. It truly is a beautiful thing...you should try it.

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New Whitacre piece

Eric Whitacre has scored a Kipling text, "The White Seal's Lullaby," for piano and SATB (we'll probably see it scored for other vocal ensembles if it isn't already available). Mr. Whitacre titled his piece "The Seal's Lullaby," rather than keeping Kipling's original title...perhaps a copyright issue? But here's a link to his blog about the premiere of the piece complete with recording! Enjoy!

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